


Potential

by wallflowerwriting



Category: Carmilla (Web Series)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-03
Updated: 2015-01-03
Packaged: 2018-03-05 03:58:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,261
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3104744
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wallflowerwriting/pseuds/wallflowerwriting
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A lot of people think the Summer Society are monster hunters so I made them all Slayers thus combining Carmilla with Buffy the Vampire Slayer (again I know). Mostly focusing on Danny's life before she came to Silas.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Potential

Danny always had felt different, ever since she was young. She had chalked it up to the fact that she was so much taller than other girls. She had resented this difference when she was a child; the urge to blend in was strong. It had made her quiet and reserved. She felt different and the kids could sense this and kept their distance. She didn’t like playing dress up or house. She didn’t want Barbie dolls for Christmas or to be a princess for Halloween. Most weekends she spent playing catch with her older brother and her father and at the age of ten she told her parents she wanted to play Little League to which she specified it had to be baseball not softball. Her parents were delighted although her mother was slightly worried. Little League was a mostly boy group and boys at that age were particularly averse to girls encroaching on what they considered their territory. Danny’s father reassured his wife that Danny was tough and could handle it.  
During Danny’s first practice, her mother’s fears were validated.

  
“What’s she doing here? Softball practice is over at Jameson Field.” A little boy with a backwards cap stated when Danny went up to bat.

  
“I want to play baseball.” Danny stated simply.

  
“Baseball is for boys, softball is for girls.” He stated smugly as if this was a genius piece of information and high-fived one of the other boys standing near him.

“Baseball is for whoever wants to play.” The coach countered. “Now go ahead Danny.”

  
Danny had a natural ability for the sport. She wasn’t the best on the team but it was mostly because those other boys had practiced. They went to the park in groups and played and practiced and had been doing so since before Little League had started. Even though Danny was on their team, they never invited her along. Danny continued to practice either by herself or with her brother and father as best she could and her improvement didn’t go unnoticed by the coach. She slowly started to gain the respect of her fellow teammates, although most games she was still taunted and jeered at by the players on the other teams.

  
The Blue Jays were exceptionally notorious for this especially their star player. His most famous insult was that girls were weaker than boys and this was why Danny had never hit a homerun. Although not all the boys on his team had hit homeruns either, they weren’t about to point this out and be compared to a girl, so they snickered as he rained down insults before the game began. Danny closed her eyes and tried to block him out, was unsuccessful and felt tears start to sting behind her eyes. If there was one thing that would make this situation worse it was letting them see her cry, thus intensifying their girl stereotypes. She silently prayed, not that he would stop because that was much too farfetched for her even to imagine, but that someone from her team would defend her worth as a member of the team. Unfortunately even this wasn’t going to happen, so Danny ground her teeth, kept the tears at bay, and didn’t look at her antagonist.

  
When it was her turn to go up to the plate, she held her bat awkwardly and surveyed the field. The outfielders moved in and she saw her antagonist smirk at the pitcher’s mound, as he stood ready to strike her out. She bent her knees and brought her bat up behind her getting in the perfect batting position that her father had taught her and as she did she felt this surge of power and confidence flow through her body. She felt different, she felt more, she felt complete, like every molecule of her being had changed on some basic level and now she was who she was always meant to be. She turned her head and looked the pitcher right in his eyes and smirked back at him. The first pitch he threw, she hit out of the park, marking the first of her many homeruns.

  
From that day on she embraced her difference. When high school started, Danny saw even more advantages to her build, her long legs helped put her strides above the other girls during track meets and her height had made her a formidable opponent on the basketball court. Baseball was still her main sport and she was even on the boys’ varsity team all through high school. Playing sports was one of the only times Danny felt remotely in her element. She still felt different but at least now being different had benefits and being a sports goddess earned her respect from her fellow students and a group of friends amongst her teammates. She was even a role model to other girls who had different interests from what was considered normal for them. Young girls in the community looked up to her and embraced their differences whether it was interest in sports or science or cars. She helped them realize that being a girl shouldn’t stop them from pursuing their dreams no matter what their dream was. She was something of a hometown hero.

  
Danny was proud of this but she was also keeping a secret from everyone; she was holding back. At track meets she didn’t run as fast as she could have. During baseballs games she didn’t hit the ball as hard as she was able to. Her raw power frightened her. Once when she had dropped her cellphone under the couch and couldn’t reach it, she had casually lifted the couch up with one hand as if it was feather-light and kicked the phone out from underneath. She hadn't given this a second thought until she was back sitting on the couch, phone in hand. Normal seventeen-year-olds weren’t supposed to be able to do that. Hell grown men weren’t able to do that.

  
She went to her room and brought up Google on her computer. She typed in superhuman strength. The first page was about hysterical strength; she opened the link. It was described as a display of extreme strength occurring when people are in life or death situations. She had been annoyed when she couldn’t reach her phone but nowhere near the emotions one would feel in a life or death situation so she went back to the Google results. The next link she took was titled supernatural strength and had a list of superheroes on it, the only two she recognized were Superman and Spiderman.

  
Danny felt ridiculous standing in the middle of her backyard, eyes closed, arms outstretched. How did one realize they could fly, she thought. She tried jumping. She tried lowering her arms and then outstretching them again when she jumped. She tried running with her arms outstretched and then jumping when she gained speed. One thing became apparent to her; she couldn't fly. She already felt dumb enough so for the hell of it she walked up to the side of her house and put her hands against it, then slowly pulled them away. She didn’t stick. So if she wasn’t Superman or Spiderman, what was she?  
Danny spent her study periods looking up different incidents of super strength trying to figure out what she was or what she had as the seniors around her researched different colleges. About a month into her search, she had mostly lost faith that she would figure it out. Maybe she was just a freak and would have to be careful her whole life.

  
One day she was walking to her car after a track meet when she was approached by a man who looked to be in his thirties with curly blonde hair. He said his name was Andrew and that he was part of the Slayer Organization, which was responsible for locating and training girls called Slayers. He also told Danny that she was one of these Slayers and he apologized that it had taken them so long to find her. Danny had been confused but it made a certain kind of sense. She had always felt different and now she knew why. What exactly did these Slayers do? She had asked him curiously. Hunt demons and primarily vampires, he had answered no hint of joking in his serious expression. Danny on the other hand had burst out laughing. Vampires aren’t real she argued but nevertheless she agreed to meet him that night at the local cemetery.

  
When she arrived he was already there with four other girls, she assumed all Slayers as well. That night Danny encountered her first vampire, she also killed her first vampire. She was a natural and appeared to be a born leader, Andrew remarked. Some of the other girls were hesitant and unsure, though they all possessed the same power, Danny adjusted to it better. They were scared of this creature trying to kill them, they didn’t know how to fight, and their reflexes weren’t sharp. All signs of Slayers that had yet to be trained but Danny took point, yelling out orders to the other girls and following her instincts. She took the vampire down as if she had been doing it for years and after the vampire had turned to dust in front of her she had turned to Andrew with a question in her eyes, ‘Did that really just happen?’ He had smiled and nodded and Danny looked around at the other girls watching her in wonder and Danny had to admit to herself she felt like she had finally found where she belonged.

  
The next few days he briefed her on the job she and the other girls would embark upon in the fall. The Slayer Organization had caught word of a ritual that took place every twenty years at Silas University in Styria in which girls were abducted and possibly sacrificed for some unknown reason the Slayer Organization was still researching. In three years it would be time for it to happen again. Danny and the four girls along with some other Slayers that would join them over the course of the three years would be positioned to stop this ritual once and for all. They were to start as freshmen there to get a feel for the place and all the faculty, staff, and students and to try and figure out who was involved. If they could figure out who was behind it before it started that would be terrific but it was more likely things would seem fairly normal until the ritual was close at hand so in the meantime they were to train and prepare. A division of the Slayer Organization would also be positioned nearby to assist the girls with their research and training.

  
The girls spent the summer training not unlike the many sports teams Danny had been a part of. They practiced hunting and slaying and learning to rely on each other and working together with Danny as their leader. That August they flew out to Styria and moved into Silas University. Danny had secured a house that had once been a fraternity and had done so by saying she and other girls wanted to form an outdoor social club for all girls’ athletics so that they could all live together. The director of residence life had been more than happy to meet their needs congratulating the girls who all had various athletic scholarships. Danny named them the Summer Society partly because they had been formed and had bonded during that summer before their freshman year but mostly for Buffy Summers. Buffy had been the Slayer during the times when there had only been one, in fact it was under her leadership that all potential Slayers were activated thus making it so all potentials would experience being a Slayer rather than living unfulfilled destinies if they weren’t chosen to be activated. Although Danny had yet to meet her, she was eternally grateful to Buffy Summers, without whom she may have lived her whole life never being able to fully explain why she felt different.

  
Danny’s first two years at Silas were pretty close to the normal college experience. The girls studied for their classes and went to sports practice and went to parties. The only added activity was that they also trained and went out hunting vampires at night. They found many but none involved with the mysterious ritual that was gradually getting closer everyday. Danny fell into a routine and she almost forgot about the impending doom looming overhead. That was until her third year started and girls started disappearing. She realized now was the time for the girls to buckle down and get serious.

  
They were still without leads until Danny met Laura Hollis, a freshman and also a student in one of her English TA classes. Laura’s roommate Betty had been one of the girls who had recently disappeared and upon meeting Laura’s new roommate, Carmilla, Danny decided she was very vampire-like. Once Laura described the blood in the soymilk container incident to her, her apprehensions were confirmed, Carmilla was indeed a vampire and it was highly suspicious that she showed up at this time and in a missing girl’s room. She couldn’t let Laura know that Carmilla was a vampire or that Danny was a Slayer. To Danny though what she had to do was obvious, she had to get all the information Carmilla had and then she had to kill her.


End file.
